


chrysalis

by mimiofthemalfoys



Series: songs from the summer sea [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Fluff and Angst, I mean kinda?, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, idk what this is just wanted to write some myalayne, mia is so gay it's not funny george, taking a break from my jonsa agenda to present miss sansa's not so platonic feelings for girls, wlw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23185237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimiofthemalfoys/pseuds/mimiofthemalfoys
Summary: "someday if you like, we can go down to that little lake by alyssa’s. I’ll bring cedra and duncan. And you can tell me all about the ways you find me splendid."surely, the gods must mock Alayne Stone.
Relationships: Alayne Stone/Mya Stone, Sansa Stark/Mya Stone
Series: songs from the summer sea [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666576
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22
Collections: ASOIAF Rarepair Week





	chrysalis

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the asoiaf rare pairs: a dream of spring challenge  
> day 2: prompt- dreams/children  
> sapphic yearning in the vale, you know how it be.

Sansa has never been kissed.

It’s not a lie. She’s had her hand touched by lips in politely tailored admiration and she’s had kraken tentacle mouths sucking out her air and she’s had dirty hungry claws on her body, scaly as mud-lion spines. That’s not what she wants.

Oh there have been men alright. Big ugly men with hoarse voices and coarse hair who like her to be just so- pretty silky porcelain girl with a string of pearls for her hair and a brittle, brittle core. (Men like ~~breaking~~ brittle things.)

  


But.

Not a good proper kiss.

  


_Proper_ : something which won’t break. Something she won’t press into her skin, only for it to flit away and evaporate, leaving no trace behind.

Something she can cup in the palm of her hand, like a fiercely guarded secret. Or a prayer.

These days, there aren’t many things she can call her own. It’s not too much to ask for.

* * *

“That’s a falsehood,” says Myranda, lips flecked with honey and lemon. “You are the prettiest of us.”

“So what?”

“So I think you are hiding something, Alayne. It’s a sham act of virtue.”

“I’m not hiding anything.” _except my name and lineage and history and virtue and vices and_

“Sure you are. What about Marillion? He was a comely fellow, don’t you think?”

Sansa hesitates. This is icy ground. They have had a history together. “That’s rather disgraceful of you to say, don’t you think? He killed our Lady Lysa.” _not hiding anything, anything-_

“Yes, yes, all that I know ( _does she_? Myranda’s eyes are sharp and quick, as of a hunting falcon’s; sometimes Sansa feels watched.) But don’t you _think_ -”

“Leave her alone,” Mya says, in her quiet Mya way. She hasn’t spoken all evening and that’s fine, sometimes she goes whole days without a word, occupying very little space in the Eyrie. Her eyes are calm. Blue steel.

Sansa takes a large bite of her cake; the tang of Dornish lemons floods her mouth. “Alayne does not care for this conversation,” Mya repeats and Sansa finds she quite likes her name-her fake name- on the older girl’s tongue.

Randa only guffaws. Licks her plate clean of crumbs.

Before going to bed, she rattles out an endless list of all the men she’s kissed: the ostler boys and handsome flute-players and even some of the sons of her father’s wards.

“We’re children now” she trills merrily, shedding her gossamers like feathers by the bed. “We should play while we are green. Men don’t care for old maidens, Alayne.”

  


Later Mya seeks her out in the godswood, by the frost-lined statue of Sharra Arryn. “I am sorry about Myranda,” she says. “She talks too much.”

“You don’t have to be. I like talkers.”

“Very well-” Mya begins and then stops as if she dropped her words down a ravine and couldn’t fish them back. Lately they’ve all been stumbling upon their words. The Eyrie does that to dreamers.

“There will be time, Alayne.”

“Time for what?” she find the play of mountain starlight very pleasing against the blue of Mya’s eyes.

“Time for you to meet someone charming and gentle. We _are_ children.”

“ _Oh.”_ In the night, Alyssa’s Tears sounds like thunder by the south courtyard. “That’s very kind of you-” but then she remembers, _woman grown of spice and wit,_ so she mimes Myranda, mimes the way she stands when sermonising, her left hand perched on the jut of her hip. “ _Men don’t care for old maidens, Mya_.”

She expects a laugh, maybe an unimpressed raised eyebrow.

Instead, Mya sighs and replies, “Yes. But I don’t care for men either.”

She leaves, crunching the last frost of the winter beneath her ugly ungainly boiled leather boots. Sansa remains in the godswood for her prayers, her breathing shallow.

Later when she rubs her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the aftertaste of honey floods her palate like a river.

* * *

Mya’s eyes are a different shade of blue to Sansa’s. Baratheon eyes, so deep a cobalt they look all wrong against the lighter colours preferred in the Vale.

At odd hours- sewing a bullion knot to embroider patterned roses onto Sweetrobin’s collars, perhaps, or trailing her hand in the fountain by the Maiden’s Tower, she finds herself thinking about ugly boots. Unkempt hair like a raven’s wing. Ends up humming the coarse songs Mya always sings when she grooms the mules. In Sansa’s mouth they feel distasteful, incongruous even. She decides she loves them, and feels rather wicked for having committed them to memory.

About Briden’s wife, who was shaped like a pear and who, on solstice nights, tasted like one too. Suchlike.

Gods.

* * *

_There’s nothing wrong about wanting to touch something pretty. Gauge its prettiness in tactility_.

Mya complains about the torrent of guests, complains about ferrying boorish noblewomen down icy ribbons of mountain passages. _A stream of perspiring bejewelled buffaloes_ , she calls them. Sansa listens while hemming the skirts of a new dress, a silvery-white affair with gauzy winged sleeves: sewn for the solstice dance, meant to show off curve and skin.

_If Harry looks away, you fail, my sweetling. All of this shall have been in vain._

“Ask your father to pay me richly. Compensate my mules. Cedra almost collapsed, and I’ve had her since I was _six_.”

Sansa laughs, promises she will. They are quiet again and _fine_ , she thinks, _that’s fine_.

“You’re very good at these pretty things.”

She pretends she didn’t listen. Continues working, increasingly aware that she must be as red as a licked cherry skin.

“I wish I was good at high lady manners and graces. Not that they would help me, baseborn as I am-”

“You are rather clever, Mya; you are splendid in other ways and I like you very well without airs and graces.”

(Later when Sansa looks back upon her words, it is deeply embarrassing. Where did Alayne Stone of all people become the yardstick to measure off paupered Vale girls?)

“Why, thank you Alayne.” It comes off so merry that Sansa feels unsettled being at the receiver’s end. “What a strange girl you are.”

_A very different shade of blue. Stormland blue._

_And-_

_There’s nothing wrong about wanting to touch. Even if it is pretty. Especially if it is pretty._

She places her hand upon Mya’s right cheek.

The brunette, initially surprised at this show of physical affection, hesitates, then turns her head, leans into her touch. _The lightest caress._ Sansa lets her palm rest there, against Mya’s high, taut cheekbone, for a heartbeat, before dropping down, too easily, too carelessly for it to imply either emotion.

“Someday if you like, we can go down to that little lake by Alyssa’s. I’ll bring Cedra and Duncan. And you can,”-here an almost impish grin- “tell me all about the ways you find me splendid.”

Surely, the gods must mock her?

“Yes.” _Yes? Yes?!_

At night, sitting down to finish her work, Sansa realises she’s lost count of the stitches. She pries the seam open with her fingers. This whole ordeal feels a bit ridiculous, to be honest.

* * *

~~Littlefinger~~ Father keeps active vigil through all of the ceremony, and then the dance, and the feast too. Sansa is painted and pinned up like a necklace in a jeweller’s window. She is all white. White dress and white jewels and white hairnet in red hair, a conscious decision made by her mentor, of all people, to mirror the red and white diamonds of Harry’s heraldry.

_Mentor._ What an ugly word.

He asks her hand for three dances and she says yes each time, wishing she was somewhere else. During the second, there’s a turn and as Sansa moves from his arms into Terrance Lynderly’s, she decides she hates the way Harry’s grip feels.

* * *

Somehow, it is wrong.

She hates how she feels around this man she is to wed.

He’s very handsome. It angers her that he is.

It angers her that he has been with other women. That she has to take her vows in the godswood, the same godswood where she had mimed Myranda, and then bed him and pretend she’s not another vessel for him to bury himself in, to wring out his pleasure from, until she gets “fat as a cow”, like Cissy did, no doubt, and Saffron too, all those other girls he ended up bestowing with half-Hardyngs of their own.

She wonders what he’ll think about Briden’s peach-shaped wife.

* * *

_What had she thought about the Tyrell girls?_

Sansa doesn’t remember. It will come back to bite her, later.

* * *

The water rushes blue-white-green at the bottom, where cataract levels into icy stream.

“That is _not_ appropriate wear for trudging down a mountain trail,” Mya says when Sansa tries to hitch her elegant blue tea-gown, ever so slightly, while skipping over the slimiest rocks.

“I don’t have riding breeches.”

“Remind me next time. I’ll lend you some. You are smaller, but we can clinch it with a belt or something.”

The water is neck deep, a mix of many kinds of aquamarine, and cold, very cold. There are no hot springs in this part of the Vale.

Mya laughs when Sansa yelps and grabs her arm. “Minnows,” she says, like that’s the most natural thing to know. It probably is. Princesses and noblewomen seldom talk about minnow and trout.

“Here, hold on,” she feels Mya’s fingers lace with hers underneath the ripples. It’s so cold her skin is numb. It’s difficult to tell apart their hands.

“What are we doing?”

“Floating.”

“Yes, why?”

“It’s fun.”

Doubtful, but it’s not altogether terrible to think that she can’t differentiate Mya’s skin from hers anymore. The water blurs everything.

“How was your dance?”

_How she jumps, from one thread of talk to the next!_

“Terrible. He smelled like Arbor Red.” Sansa confesses, revelling in how deliciously this feels like gossip.

“Dragged you to a dark corner? For a little moment?”

“Gods _no,_ ” it’s a knee-jerk response of relief (though Harry had tried, oh yes he had!) and only then she sees Mya’s eyes slit.

“Myranda told me you wanted to play games with him.”

“Don’t listen to her.”

“Myranda never assumes.”

Sansa is scared. She is scared of the enormity of her imminent answer, and she is scared of letting it slip.

Mostly she is scared she’ll spend the rest of her life in white hairnets, kissing coarse mouths in dark alcoves.

“Why are you probing?”-it’s terrible how petulant she sounds. “It’s not in your place.”

Hair’s breadth of a second as old blood spills. She becomes aware of the tiny spaces between their fingers, the river rushing through the side of one’s index to swallow the other’s thumb. Ugly proprietary knowledge. Mya stares, angry, disappointed, wretched.

  


The water seems colder than before.

  


An apology rises in Sansa’s throat ( _but what? what is there to say?)_ which she smothers, choking on the tang of it.

For one golden moment, Sansa believes in instinct.

  


Just as well, because then Mya comes closer, her fingers tightening round Sansa’s, and then closer still, until there’s not enough space and it seems just right to close the apex between their mouths.

  


And she does. Close it.

Soft mouth. Soft touch.

  


A proper kiss.

  


_You fail, my sweetling._

  


Mya pulls her, she lets herself be pulled at her, they come together in the heart of the stream, and they kiss harder, harder.

It seems right. All of it.

* * *

A recollection:

_She was only older by a month or so, her name day mere weeks away from Elinor’s, but when Sansa looked at the Tyrell girls, all she saw were children. Children living in soft green dreams of gardens and galleys. They didn’t know what blood spurting out of a battle wound looked like. They didn’t have bruises on their back and dried flecks of old blood like pomegranate seeds at the edges of their mouth._

_They loved the feel of each other, and they wanted it all, hands in hair, chin on elbow, proof of their need in a seam of skin-and-skin. Unchanged by the war, hungry for love, the kind stolen from minstrels’ songs._

_Just children._

* * *

Where do they go from here?

  


They court danger. In the river, but also later, every night at the godswood, in her chambers sometime- once, too bravely, just outside the bedchamber in the Lord’s tower. No one ever comes to know. She has learnt her craft well.

Mya is a good learner too. She learns to winnow what Sansa likes from what she doesn’t, she learns what their bodies can do to each other and she learns to believe in keeping secrets.

It’s all ephemeral. That much she knows, for she’s not a wide-eyed ingénue any longer. When the time comes, forced to be a woman grown, Sansa will meet her fate, Harry and Eyrie and war and revenge and a long, long winter.

For now, it’s spring. For now, they’re still children.

She’ll take it while it lasts.

* * *

  


**Author's Note:**

> *shrug emoji* hate it? you're not special because SO DO I just get in line.  
> We're doing some mental readjustment here because Sansa and Mya have a 6 year gap so pretend it's less idk


End file.
